Rafe Marquez, 59, has spent the last 12 years living out of a dented F150, crisscrossing the Southeast as a minor league baseball scout, logging 40,000 miles a year to watch 17-year-old left-handers throw 92-mile-per-hour fastballs and lie about their GPA. He’s stubborn to a fault, the kind of guy who’d eat cold peanut butter sandwiches out of a cooler for three days rather than stop at a small town diner and make small talk, and he hasn’t so much as held someone’s hand since his wife left him for a pharmaceutical sales rep she met at a PTA meeting. He only agreed to come to the West Asheville block party because his next door neighbor, a retired elementary school teacher, left three plates of chocolate chip cookies on his porch with a handwritten note threatening to stop feeding his stray cat if he bailed.
The air sticks to the back of his neck like wet tissue, thick with the smell of hickory smoked brisket and cut grass, a bluegrass band plucking a twangy rendition of Folsom Prison Blues from the stage at the end of the block. He’s hiding by the homemade lemonade stand, avoiding eye contact with every neighbor who tries to wave him over, when Lila trips over the rolling cooler at his feet. She’s got a stack of free kids’ books tucked under one arm, the ones she gives away for free from her used bookstore down the street, and she stumbles forward, almost face-planting into the tub of ice, before Rafe reaches out and catches her by the elbow.
His palm wraps around her warm, sun-kissed skin, and he feels a jolt go up his arm that has nothing to do with the frayed extension cord running under the cooler. He knows who she is, obviously. She’s his ex-wife’s younger cousin, 10 years his junior, the kid who used to crash on his couch every fall during Appalachian State football games, begging him to make his famous mint lemonade with no added sugar. He’d written her off as off limits the second his ex walked out, some stupid unspoken rule he’d made up to avoid drama, even when the divorce was finalized and his ex moved to Tampa and never spoke to any of her family again.
She laughs, swatting a strand of wavy auburn hair out of her face, and the sound cuts through the noise of the crowd. She smells like lavender laundry detergent and old paper, the exact scent of the bookstore he walks past every morning on his way to get coffee, the one he’s never had the nerve to go into. She leans in to talk, her shoulder pressing firm against his bicep, because the banjo has gotten louder, and he can feel the warmth of her through the thin cotton of his old Asheville Tourists jersey. She teases him about still wearing that ratty jersey, says she remembers him wearing it to the 2016 playoff game they went to, the one where he caught a foul ball and gave it to a kid in the row behind them.
He’s surprised she remembers. He’d convinced himself for years that she only saw him as her cousin’s boring ex-husband, the guy who fixed her broken laptop when she was in college and never said much. She keeps leaning in, her eyes locked on his every time she talks, not the quick polite glance most people give him when they’re just waiting for their turn to speak. When she hands him a cup of lemonade, extra mint, no sugar, just how he likes it, her fingers linger on his for two full seconds, and he can feel the rough callus on her index finger from turning thousands of book pages.
He’s torn, sharp and hot, between the voice in his head that’s been yelling off limits for 12 years, the part of him that’s disgusted by the idea of crossing some invisible line he drew all by himself, and the part of him that’s been starved for this kind of casual, warm attention for longer than he can remember. He hasn’t had a conversation that didn’t revolve around fastball velocity or a kid’s batting average in months, and she’s asking him about the scouting trips, about the tiny towns he’s been to, not just making polite small talk. She laughs at his dumb joke about the high school catcher who showed up to a tryout hungover and threw a ball into the stands, hitting a grandma in a lawn chair.
When the sun dips below the treeline, painting the sky pink and orange, she nods toward the road leading up to the old Craggy Point lookout, the spot everyone goes to watch the Fourth of July fireworks. She says she’s got a cooler of peach hard seltzer and a wool blanket in the back of her Subaru, says she was gonna go up alone, but if he’d rather skip the screaming kids and the drunk guys setting off illegal firecrackers in the street, he can come with.
He almost makes an excuse, almost says he has scouting reports to finish, the same line he’s used to get out of every invitation for a decade. Then he looks at her, the way she’s biting her lower lip like she’s nervous he’ll say no, the faint smudge of ink on her wrist from marking book prices earlier that day, and he says yes.
The drive up the mountain takes 15 minutes, the windows down, the radio playing old Tom Petty, and when they get to the lookout, it’s empty, no other crowds fighting for spots. She spreads the blanket out on the grass, hands him a seltzer, and the first firework goes off just as he sits down, painting the sky bright red. She leans her head on his shoulder, and he doesn’t pull away, wraps his arm around her waist, feels the soft curve of her hip under the thin cotton of her sundress. When the next firework bursts, blue and gold, he tilts his head down to kiss her, and she tastes like peach seltzer and mint.
